How does RATS work to keep stuff off the search engines?

I'm interested in this as a layperson - I don't code HTML, but say I wanted to put up a website and keep it's contents from the prying eyes of all search engines, like RATS does - How does RATS do this and or - how would I or anyone else do this?

There's a couple different ways. You can use a "robots.txt" file. You can choose which files/directories the search robots can ignore or include:

www.robotstxt.org...


You can also use the "META" tag at the beginning of an HTML page to prevent search bots from viewing that page (or it's links):

css-tricks.com...



Malicious bots or email search bots (or any bot), for example, can ignore the commands above and browse the pages anyway if they are so-programmed to do.

Hope that answered your question.

To keep it from prying eyes you'll need to password protect it as all the robots.txt etc stuff is more of a gentleman's agreement not actual rules, you can try and block them via various methods but if they want to get access they will do.

and if you really don't want it on the net you shouldn't have it anyways near the net in the first place

You can also set up Apache to block traffic with no useragent--which is common for bots. The techniques mentioned by _Bonez_ are more common, but I'd say ATS has their own secret special way we dont know about

ETA: redundant. Nevermind.